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Why I like Apple in Consumer Electronics?

It has been thirteen months since we bought iMac (base configuration), and nearly 12 months since we bought iPad 16GB Wifi+Cellular). When I was first exposed to Apple products, I was excited like a kid. As time went by, we got used to it and as they say, ‘human beings get used to good/bad too quickly, hence excitement vanishes’. In addition, we have a Google Nexus 4 (bought in late June) and Sony Vaio Touch Screen Ultrabook (end of March 2013). Unfortunately, Ultrabook fell down from a couple of feet height with laptop bag and cushion, and surprisingly or unsurprisingly, the screen got damaged. Ultrabook did not have any problems with day-to-day functioning though. However, both Ultrabook and Nexus 4 have only one issue – reliability.

Nexus 4 is/was supposed to be a realistic competitor for iPhone. Unfortunately, if we take a weekly performance, Nexus 4 lags far behind not only iPhone but also Samsung Galaxy S3 or any other mid range devices. On numerous occasions the standard message appears, ‘Unfortunately the app has stopped…’. Worst affected app I guess is cricinfo, followed by navigation and games. The phone heats up within five minutes into a call without earphones or if you simply attempt to take photos for more than five minutes. Battery dries up before morning if I sleep with 20% battery levels, and hence alarm won’t wake me up! Facebook seems to have some irritating issue, for sharing photos. Typically, I navigate to ‘Gallery’ click ‘Share’ and once I select Facebook, the Facebook page opens. There we typically select place of the photo taken, or friends to tag etc. Once we select those options and hit ‘share’ it asks again to share, and usually any user would think previous attempt did not work or so. But it would have shared the same item twice! AppGyver Scanner works perfectly alright on iPad but not on Nexus 4. One strange issue is requesting for authentication which does not take user to any other page but only keeps popping up irregularly. If you uninstall/update an app home screen short-cut does not reflect changes. Twitter app short cut from home screen said, the ‘App is not installed’ even though app was very much available in the drawer. Latest issue is found with device heating up on plugged charge.

Sony Vaio laptop was no cheap at Rs 60,000/- but the laptop performance feels like it cost Rs 30,000 too much! Terribly gets re-started at least twice a week, which is simply not acceptable for six months elementary browsing usage. Most inefficient hardware is the touch-pad. My wife hates the Ultrabook simply because she can not scroll or do anything she wants smoothly. Mostly scrolling ends up like a drag and browser tabs quickly become independent! Worst was when it could not handle two Firefox tabs and I ended up restarting by hitting the power button. Viewing angles and display quality are terrible, colors are incorrect. Yes this one device showed me how I looked when I had closed my eyes! Web camera was simply not usable in terms of both responsiveness and capturing quality. Alt and Right click keys never worked. Battery hardly lasts beyond four hours. Windows has updates at least once in three days, so if someone is in limited data plan connection, either you can update or work without security. Till date I did not use any of the heavy spreadsheets or

Features and customization is just one side of the story. iPad even today gives 10 hour battery life on a normal usage. iPad may not give too many customization options but it is simply reliable. iMac was switched on at least 15 hours a day since the day of purchase. Never did it ask for hard reset but it always served up for hard and rough usage. Apple was exciting to begin with but now Apple is inevitable if we care for reliability and uninterrupted productivity. Of course I am not even interested in app quality on the whole Android/Windows platforms.